The term “brownfield” is used in the oil and gas industry to refer to an existing oil or gas accumulation that has reached a production plateau or even progressed to a stage of declining production. Oil and gas companies seek to extend the economic producing life of these fields through development, rehabilitation and optimization of production (hereinafter “redevelopment”). Brownfield redevelopment projects are particularly important if the industry is to continue to meet worldwide demand for cost-effective energy in the face of declining resources. Some industry experts predict that brownfields will be relied on to produce more than 50 percent of the world's oil and gas by the year 2012.
Brownfield redevelopment projects, however, are high-risk, long-term, projects. Accordingly, engineering and oilfield services companies participating in these brownfield redevelopment projects are typically compensated based on incremental production increases or on one or more key performance indicators (KPI). Therefore, full integration of subsurface engineering, production technology, well engineering and production infrastructure engineering that enables robust front-end engineering and frontloaded negotiation are of the utmost importance in order to manage the high risks involved.
Because of the high risks, brownfield redevelopment projects must be thoroughly assessed beforehand to determine economic viability prior to committing resources or making investments. A brownfield assessment helps identify, among other things, production enhancement opportunities, infill drilling, injection, workover and reactivation candidates and potentially new strategies for redevelopment of the field. The assessment is typically modeled after a traditional decision & risk analysis, including project framing, data collection, data analysis, and results interpretation & decision rendering. Usually, a number of studies must be conducted, including extensive geological & geophysical (G & G) studies, reservoir & production engineering studies, static & dynamic modeling, and other similar studies performed by multidisciplinary teams.
However, assessment of a brownfield can take 4-18 months or longer to complete. In contrast, a data room exercise for determining whether to invest in the brownfield project must typically be carried out in a matter of weeks. Several challenges contribute to the lengthy completion time, including an enormous amount of data to be analyzed, a lack of certain kinds of data, uncertainties regarding data quality, insufficient time to conduct sufficiently detailed studies, and the like. Moreover, while a tremendous amount of expert knowledge and best practices have been developed over time by the individual engineers and other personnel who perform brownfield assessments, existing procedures do not provide a way to capture and systematically enforce the use of this knowledge and best practices. Consequently the quality and reliability of the assessment deliverables may vary from engineering team to engineering team and even engineer to engineer.
Accordingly, what is needed is a way to conduct brownfield assessments in a more timely, efficient, and consistent manner. In addition, what is needed is a way to systematically capture and enforce the use of expert knowledge and best practices in such brownfield assessments.